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I have lived in Bogot\u00e1 my whole life and I have seen corruption and really crappy administrations in the city for a long, long time.<\/p>\nI have lived in Bogot\u00e1 my whole life and I have seen corruption and really crappy administrations in the city for a long, long time.<\/p>\n
So now, The Economist<\/em> has this article about Gustavo Petro<\/strong><\/a>, Bogot\u00e1’s current mayor, and his issues with rubbish collection. It is quite fair and sums up the city’s situation quite well.<\/p>\n But here’s what rubs me the wrong way:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n BACK in the 1990s a string of reforming mayors turned Bogot\u00e1 into a beacon of enlightened municipal government in an otherwise troubled country, creating an extensive bus rapid-transport (BRT) network, parks and public libraries. Sadly, Colombia\u2019s capital now risks becoming a byword again, this time for municipal mismanagement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No, no, no, no, no.<\/p>\n There was a string of mayors with good PR, nothing more. This was never, and never has been a “beacon of enlightened municipal government”.<\/p>\n Let me tell you about Bogot\u00e1’s BRT network and it’s mayor.<\/p>\n The system is called Transmilenio<\/a><\/em>, and was a mediocre BRT network imported from Curitiba<\/a>, a Brazilian city with no more than two million people. Bogot\u00e1 has more than eight million residents<\/a>, so there you go – we’re using a BRT network designed for far much fewer people (so, yeah, everytime you use Transmilenio<\/em> you experience what it’d be to be a canned sardine).<\/p>\n To make matters worse, the mayor who wasted our money on\u00a0Transmilenio<\/em>, Enrique Pe\u00f1alosa<\/strong>, is\u00a0the most corrupt politician I have ever known about – and that’s saying a lot.<\/p>\n Let me tell you about his story:<\/p>\n His father was\u00a0Enrique Pe\u00f1alosa Camargo,\u00a0Minister of Agriculture, who was accused of\u00a0influence peddling and perjury<\/a>;\u00a0due to the bad PR the scandal could generate, the club of which Pe\u00f1alosa Camargo was a member decided to expel the Pe\u00f1alosas.<\/p>\n Later on, when during Enrique Jr. administration, the city\u00a0expropriated the Country Club’s polo field<\/a>, just because. And this is what Pe\u00f1alosa said<\/a> in an interview for a book about his time in charge of the city:<\/p>\n The land issue is a political problem and I can already expropriate all the land around the city without compensation to anyone or anything.<\/p>\n So what if they [the terrorist guerrillas] take all the rural area? It is almost irrelevant, a bunch of crazy men lost in the jungle, kidnapping people on the farms, in the roads.<\/p>\n It would be great if one could improve wealth distribution via guerrilla pressures [by threatening club owners]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You have to wonder if someone who thinks terrorism is OK as long as it aims to a group of people he despises is the posterboy of\u00a0a “beacon of enlightened municipal government”.<\/p>\n But I digress. Let’s go back to Transmilenio<\/em>.<\/p>\n There were a lots of issues with Transmilenio<\/em>, like the fact that almost 96% of its income goes to private pockets, while the city (taxpayers’ money) run with all the expenses.<\/p>\n Bogot\u00e1 has always been stuck with traffic jam, because no one builds enough roads and streets. Transmilenio<\/em> was suppposed to be a solution to that. Instead, they decided to put Transmilenio<\/em> to work on the fastest lanes of the few highways we got! So now, we lack presentable highways and traffic jams just got worse.<\/p>\n Not happy with that, Pe\u00f1alosa closed parking bays and various entrances to highways, so the traffic jams got worse. But he hadn’t even started: he then put a curfew on everyone’s cars, something called Pico y Placa<\/a><\/em>. This is the logic (or lack thereof) behind that measure: since there are too many cars, you can’t go out on certain dates, depending on your car’s license plate’s number. His track record on civil liberties is awful!<\/p>\n So there you go – you’re being forced to use a crappy public system of transportation (we’ll get to the crappy part just now) because the Government didn’t build streets, neither it repaired the broken ones.<\/p>\n Did I say crappy public system of transportation. Hell yeah! These were the Transmilenio<\/em> figures<\/a> after ten years:<\/p>\n We have paid 51.319 million pesos [$\u00a025’659.500 US dollars] in repairs, 6800, the number of slabs that have been replaced in the lanes of Caracas Avenue and the North Highway because they got fractured.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And why did the fracture -and keep on fracturing-? Because they were made with poor quality concrete. It turns out, Pe\u00f1alosa had some friends in the concrete business and it so happens he signed a contract that would allow them not just to use cheap concrete, but made they kept on being hired in order to do the repair works. (Andr\u00e9s Camargo<\/strong>, the guy in charge of the Urban Development Institute during Pe\u00f1alosa’s administration was\u00a0sentenced to seven years in prison<\/a>.)<\/p>\n And speaking of low quality, Transmilenio<\/em> has also been criticized because it uses heavy polluting diesel<\/a>.<\/p>\n